THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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This combination of negative feelings towards the father is projected onto him and
experienced by the child as persecutory anxiety in relation to a threatening object. At the
same time, however, the child experiences contradictory feelings of love and compassion
for the father. This results in depressive anxiety and guilt, together with reparative
fantasies of reviving the father, injured or killed in the child's mind by his destructive
wishes.
Primitive identification is not based solely on projective mechanisms, but on a complex
and interrelated pattern of introjection, projective identification, and re-introjection ofthe
object containing the projected aspects:
The process ofreintrojecting a projected part ofthe self includes internalizing
a part ofthe object into whom the projection has taken place, a part which the
patient may feel to be hostile, dangerous, and most undesirable to reintroject
(Klein, 1955, p. 171).
Fabian consequently re-introjected a bad paternal object which threatened to "suck out"
his life", thereby exacerbating the need to escape from himself through projective
identification. At the same time, his identification with his actual greedy and selfindulgent
father manifested in his desire to "rob other people oftheir lives" (p. 162).
This scenario is complicated further by the child's homosexual impulses towards his
father. In the novel, the Devil's underling, a "young and handsome man", persuades
Fabian to accept the Devil's 'gift' in a highly seductive fashion. In a manner reminiscent
of Freud's Haizmann case, Klein interprets this as a projection of Fabian's "early
feminine and passive-homosexual impulses", i.e. the desire to be his father's lover. The
Devil is portrayed as seductive precisely because he is the bearer ofthe 'victim's' sexual,
as well as destructive, projected impulses.
Although Klein largely attributes the qualities of the bad father (the Devil) to the child's
destructive projective identifications, she is not blind to the role played by external reality
and the object's actual characteristics.
She acknowledges the importance of Fabian's